MR. GLADSTONE'S PASSION FOR HOMER.
THERE is something of more than personal interest about such avowals as Mr. Gladstone made on Tuesday night, after the reading of Mr. George Smith's paper on the Chaldsaan account of the Deluge, concerning his love for Homer. "Every day," he said, "must begin for me with my old friend Homer,— the friend of ray youth, the friend of my middle age, and of my old age, from whom I hope never to be parted as long as I have any faculties or any breath in my body." That is a strong and almost a vehement expression of attachment, but it is by no means an expression of exceptional attach- ment even among British statesmen. In Mr. Gladstone's own case it might perhaps be alleged that part of his love is due to the labour and research spent by him on the study of Homer,—that he loves Homer not only for Homer's sake, but for the same reason for which he loves old China and Wedgwood ware, for the same reason for which men love their hobbies. But that explanation would, at all events, not apply to such evidence of a statesman's delight in Homer as that of which Mr. Arnold not many years ago reminded us in his essay on translating Homer. Mr. Arnold quoted from Robert Wood's book on the genius of Homer,— the book which Goethe praised so highly,—the story of a dying President of the Council, Lord Granville, some ancestor, we suppose, of the present Lord Granville,—to whom Robert Wood went with a copy of that Treaty of Paris which concluded the Seven Years' War in 1762. "I found him," said Mr. Wood, "so languid that I preferred postponing my business for another time ; but he insisted that I should stay, saying it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty, and repeating a passage from Sarpedon's speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on the third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part he had taken in public affairs." The passage quoted was that in which Sarpedon says that if by avoiding peril it were possible to avoid old age and death, "he himself would not fight in the first line of battle," but that since none can avoid the myriads of dooms which beset men, the true conclusion was to take no account of these, but to say, "Let us go." "His Lordship," reported Mr. Wood, "repeated the last word,"—(To,coEv, the word of command to go on),—several times, with a calm and determinate resignation ; and after a serious pause of some minutes he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which he listened with great attention, and recovered spirits enough to declare the approbation of a dying statesman (I use his own words) on the most glorious war, and most honourable peace this nation ever saw.'" On which Mr. Arnold remarks, "I quote this story, first, because it is interesting as exhibiting the English aristocracy at its very height of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the middle of the last century. I quote it, secondly, because it seems to me to illustrate Goethe's saying, which I mentioned, that our life, in Homer's view of it, represents a conflict and a hell ; and it brings out, too, what there is tonic and fortifying in this doctrine." And no doubt it was the gloomy splendour of the passage, its defiance of approaching doom, which recalled it to Lord Granville's mind, when he struggled to fix an attention relaxed by the languors of death on a public duty. And this story illustrates powerfully one of the great charms of Homer for statesmen,—the very strong sense of public duty which runs through the pictures of public life, both on the side of the Greeks and the Trojans. Others have felt the charm of Homer's fresh and vivid eye, the eye of him who,—
"Clearest-soul'd of men, Saw the wide prospect' and the Asian fen, And Tmolus' hill and Smyrna's bay,—though blind."
But we suspect that for statesmen,—for such as the Lord Granville of Robert Wood's story, and Mr. Gladstone,—the central attraction has been the keen scorn which Homer always lavishes on those who (like Paris) fight shy of their public duties from any private motive whatever, whether cowardice or simply self-indulgence. Nor can we doubt that the sombreness of the view which Homer gives of human life, what Mr. Arnold, quoting from Goethe, calls "a conflict and a hell," has also something of a special attraction in it for states- men, who themselves live in a world of unsatisfying conflict, and yet always shrink from putting their harness off. In his earliest book on Homer, Mr. Gladstone, insisting on Homer's sombre view of our mortal destiny, illustrates it by the passage in which Achilles, in the shades below, says to Ulysses, "Do not, illustrious Ulysses, do not palter with me about death. Rather would I serve for hire under a master, aye, and a needy master, on the face of the earth, than be lord of the whole world of the departed." And that sombre but tenacious clinging to the battle of life, not valuing it much, but still valuing it more than anything for which it is easy to imagine exchanging it, seems to us not only a Homeric view of life, but one curiously in harmony with the mood of British states- men. They often talk of retirement and peace,—Mr. Gladstone frequently speaks of it as a sort of visionary hope, —but they feel, with Achilles, that in the sombre conflict of life, even though it be both "a conflict and a hell," the power of fighting in the first line of battle, is not a thing to be exchanged for , any blessing of tranquillity in the pallid Elysium of an exist- 1 ence that knows no battle.
And there are other elements of attraction in Homer which probably appeal to the modern statesman ; and perhaps especially to the modern statesman with an aristocratic bias (with which Mr. Gladstone certainly began public life, though it can hardly be attributed to him now). Homer's fresh pic- ture of the power of the hereditary chiefs, and the stern con- tempt with which they chastised plebeians like Thersites who attempted to dispute it, must have a great fascination for men who feel a similar sense of individual power but see it appar- ently frittered away amidst the checks and counter-checks of modern constitutions. Mr. Gladstone is reported to have said that no one in the world "has so little of his own way as a British Prime Minister." That is by no means true of a 'king of men' in Homer. He, too, worked under conditions and checks from above, and from amongst his allies, but not from beneath ; if Heaven and his allies permitted, he could make his volition felt at once amongst his subjects. There is no stronger impression derivable from Homer, than the impres- sion of the directness of political power iu its first and simplest form. And it is one which must have a peculiar fascina- tion for modern statesmen, accustomed as they are to the enor- mous complexity and indirectness of our political machinery. Nothing is more attractive to men than a complete statuesque image of that which we desire or love, but which we are accustomed to see only by glimpses, under all the concealing cross-shadows of an intricate artificial fretwork; and it is such an image of the directly personal character of political power which we have in Homer. Here is Mr. Gladstone's earliest picture of the ruler in the heroic age :—" Whether as a governor or as governed, politics bring him, in ordinary cir- cumstances, no great share of trouble. Government is a machine of which the wheels move easily, for they are well oiled by simplicity of usages, ideas, and desires ; by unity of interest ; by respect for authority, and for those in whose hands it is reposed ; by love of the common country, common altars, the common festivities and games to which already there is large resort. In peace he settles the disputes of the people ; in war he lends them the precious example of heroic daring. He consults them and advises with them on all grave affairs ; and his wakeful care for their interests is rewarded by the ample domains which are set apart for the prince by the people." Mr. Gladstone himself would not have been a 'king of men' in those times. Not his the strongly marked simplicity of character which would appeal to the hero-worship of the heroic age. He may have learned something, both by way of example and by way of warning, from Agamemnon, of the art of receiving a deputation, and from Nestor of the art of addressing an assembly. But his love for Homer is, as far as political characteristics are concerned, the love which comes of con- trast. The simplicity of political procedure, the directness of political power in those days, fascinates his imagination not from any analogy it suggests with the circumstances which have elicited his own qualities as a ruler, but from the immense contrast. To Ulysses, with all his craft, it would never have occurred to create an oratorical deficit, as Mr. Glad- stone did in 18G0, for the sake of the pleasure of filling up the void he had created. To Nestor, with all his love for THE Bishop of Manchester's speeches are always sensible and usually exhaustive, but in his pastoral charge of Tuesday he seems to us to have missed a point or two of some importance. He was talking in a very manly, frank way of the Patronage of the Church, deprecating the general transfer of advowsons to the ratepayers, and expressing his preference for the existing system of mixed Episcopal and Lay patronage, if only the lay patrons would exercise their share of power under a deep sense of respon- sibility. We have often expressed a similar view, but it has always been under a sense of two difficulties which the Bishop does not appear to feel, or at all events does not care to discuss. One is that the congregation ought to have some sort of protection against the virtues of the patron who, if a man of strong convic- tions, may, because of the righteousness of his motives, because of his eagerness for what he deems truth, force upon a parish a clergyman whose ministry is wrecked from the first by popular dislike, a dislike frequently leading to large secessions. It is notorious that this is frequently the case where the presentee holds pronounced Ritualistic opinions, and it would be as often the case where he is a " High " Calvinist, but that this doctrine has an attraction for certain classes of English society, whom it frequently recalls from the very confines of Dissent. The other difficulty, a difficulty which seems to daunt the very boldest of Church reformers, is the large residuum of hopelessness left by our system of Church patronage in the minds of the Clerical order. A man may be in the highest degree qualified to do good work in the Church, and unless he can find a patron, or please a bishop, or interest a poli- tician, may be left for half his life in a situation in which five- sixths of his value to the Church and to the world may be entirely lost. He may be an admirable preacher to the cultivated and condemned to live in a Cornish village, or an excellent organiser and have charge of some empty City church, or an invaluable parish priest and be called on to instruct a West End audience. There is under our system no guarantee that the square man shall ever be placed in the square hole, that Dr. Liddon may not live his life in a Welsh parish, or Mr. Rogers be posted in a Lincolnshire village;or Mr. Crawley be selected to preach in Hanover Square. Fitness for the Ministry does now enter into the qualifications of the candidates for a cure, but fittingness for the special work does not, and the defect causes an extraordinary waste of power. Villages need good pastors as much as mighty cities, perhaps more, for the individual is more potent in the village, but they do not honeyed words, it would never have suggested itself to explain need precisely the same kind of men. Religion, to give an extreme away a premature menace of war, as Mr. Gladstone explained illustration, would be distinctly injured by the transfer of the existing body of London clergymen to Wales, while Wales would away Lord Odo Russell's language to Prince Bismarck concerning Russia, in 1870, by a forced construction for not in all probability be benefited in any compensating degree. a very plain sentence. The love of Mr. Gladstone for As patronage is now exercised it is nearly impossible to cure this evil, Homer is not, so far as his political qualities are concerned, ,which all men who know the condition of the Church know to be a the love of like for like, but the love of unlike for unlike. Homer very serious one. The Lord Chancellor may be as conscientious as he would not have understood "Operation A" and "Operation I will in the distribution of his ecclesiastical patronage, but it is B ' for reducing the National Debt ; and Mr. Gladstone would only 10 per cent. of the whole mass, and is not specially valuable, while as he cannot know the clergy as, for example, he knows the Bar, so he cannot be certain whether the Members who apply to him are intriguing for friends or recommending merit. The lay patron knows his own circle and no more, and however self-deny- ing he may be, he can hardly be expected to pass over the deserv- ing who are his friends in favour of the more deserving whom he knows nothing about, or may feel to be personally distasteful. He is responsible to his conscience for his own patronage,—half the whole,—but not for that of the entire Church. If fifty lay
have been impossible or would have been wasted in a world of so little involution.
Still, like all true statesmen, he has at bottom the strenuous love of political power, and the Homeric picture of political power in its first strong and simple outlines is an image on which he gazes with delight. Nothing is more curious in reading his studies of Homer than to notice the pleasure with which he distinguishes and multiplies the various shades of thought in the grand old poet, till the age of Agamemnon seems almost as complex as the age of Victoria,—how he refines on the Homeric deities (describing, for instance, Proaerpine as "the real Queen of the shades below," and Pluto as merely "a sort of King-Consort "), till it seems as if such a book as "Church Principles Considered in their Results" might almost be written about the Homeric worship,—and yet how truly he loves in his heart the simpli- city and grandeur of the outlines, which he breaks up into so many microscopic distinctions. The public spirit which is so great in Homer, the gloom of that perpetual conflict which is yet so dear to Homer's heroes, and the simplicity and directness of that political power which they wield, are all characteristics which have a natural fascination for the modern statesman ; and the last of them has probably that special fascination for Mr. Gladstone, which the grander and simpler primeval forms of power always have for the highly organised intelligence of a subtle and elaborate civilisation.
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